TWICKENHAM REACTED to the Harlequins fake blood injury affair by condemning cheating and announcing yesterday that teams who cause matches to be blighted by uncontested scrums in the new season will be forced to carry on with 14 players.
Uncontested scrums have long been a source of controversy, with sides taking a battering up front prone to running out of fit frontrow specialists. A new regulation has been drawn up for this season’s English Premiership which will allow sides to have an extra prop on the bench, but anyone who runs out of frontrowers and causes scrums to become passive will forfeit a man.
Cheating has become a global rugby issue after Harlequins were found guilty of faking a blood injury during last season’s Heineken Cup quarter-final against Leinster so they could replace Tom Williams with a specialist goal-kicker, Nick Evans, who had earlier been replaced.
The club’s director of rugby, Dean Richards, resigned after an internal club investigation and was this week banned for three years by European Rugby Cup Ltd, a sanction the International Rugby Board yesterday said would apply worldwide.
Williams was originally suspended for a year, but that was reduced this week to four months on appeal after he gave chapter and verse about not just the fabrication but the cover-up, while Steph Brennan, Harlequins’ physiotherapist last season who joined England last May, was banned for two years and yesterday suspended by the Rugby Football Union pending an investigation.
The appeal panel decided it did not have the jurisdiction to consider a misconduct charge against Quins’ match-day doctor, Wendy Chapman.
“The image of the game has been damaged and we have to take steps to repair it,” the RFU’s chief disciplinary officer, Jeff Blackett, said. “Uncontested scrums have long been a sore point with questions raised about whether injuries are legitimate and we are addressing this in the coming season by allowing an extra replacement and making sure a side does gain an advantage by going to uncontested scrums . . . As a governing body we have to do everything we can to eliminate cheating.”
The IRB is not planning to review the regulation that allows a substituted player to come back on the field as a temporary replacement for a blood victim, but it intends to introduce match commissioners and independent doctors for international matches, encouraging governing bodies to take similar measures in their own competitions, to ensure injuries are genuine, not simulated.
ERC wanted Quins to be thrown out of the Heineken Cup, but the club’s chief executive, Mark Evans, believes the club did not escape lightly. “We have lost a highly talented coach, one of our players has been banned for four months and we have been fined a large amount of money,” he said. “It is a huge wake-up call, for Harlequins and the game as a whole, and we are conducting a wide-ranging review of the club by an independent person of standing and reputation.”
Richards said: “I am a little bit shocked and surprised by it all,” he said. “The ban seems a little disproportionate and I will have to reflect on it.” He has no right of appeal because he had been cleared of misconduct at the original hearing into the affair, but he can take his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.
But Richards, Brennan and Harlequins could face further action after the appeal panel said it would be furnishing evidence of four other cases of fabrications and cover-ups involving them to the relevant authorities. They are believed to involve incidents in Premiership matches in the last couple of seasons.
Damian Hopley, the chief executive of the Professional Rugby Players’ Association, said Williams had helped the game by coming clean, adding: “He has been under tremendous pressure but his determination to tell the truth and attempt to undo the damage done to himself, his family and the image of the game speaks volumes for the enormous remorse he feels.”
Guardian Service
